Main Area and Open Discussion > General Software Discussion

$20 if you make me a 6' Molex cable. $10 for recommending a better solution.

(1/10) > >>

superboyac:
I ask for a lot of help here, so this time I present it as a challenge that I will pay for.

I have an external enclosure for my hard drive.  Apparently, the power supply is too small (in Watts delivered) for the hard drive I am using.  I need a bigger power supply in the range of 50W-80W, I'm not really sure.  My enclosure also has a convenience Molex (male) plug on the back.  Now, if I can somehow get a Molex cable 6' or longer, I can connect it to the PSU that's inside my computer case, which has plenty of juice for this.

The problem is that nobody makes a Molex cable for external use anywhere past 12" or so.  I've been scouring the web for two hours now.

So, I will pay somebody to make me a 6' cable to do this.  $20.  Or if anyone has a better solution, I'll give you $10 of my donationcredits.

One of the other solutions I considered was buying an external power supply box (or brick) and connect that to my enclosure.  But i ran into the same problem.  I couldn't find any brick that had enough power and also had a Molex connector.  Besides, it's just easier to connect to my computer's PSU anyway.


By the way, when I say Molex, I mean this:

Shades:
Are the electrical losses over such a length of cable (6 feet = about 2 meters) not too big? Or would a cable with that length impose a big strain on (one of) the power rail of the power supply?

Jumpstarting two separate ATX power supplies with one and the same button is easier...and in my point of view preferable. 

app103:
I couldn't find any brick that had enough power and also had a Molex connector.
-superboyac (July 17, 2009, 09:09 PM)
--- End quote ---

What kind of connector did you find? It might be easier to just buy an adapter like I had to do when I bought my Dell and wanted to use some older drives (it only came with ability to power SATA)

Shades:
Darn, I should have read your story instead of glancing over it. Those connectors on the back are mainly for  connecting a hard drive when an emergency occurs. Of course you can use it on a more permanent basis but I do not know how much power it can sustain like that.

With each power supply you see several bundles of cables coming out. Each of those bundles is also known as a rail and can only output a fraction of the advertised power (watts) mentioned on the power supply. I have to assume that the molex on the back of the power supply is connected to one of these rails and it is hard to tell which one without inspecting the circuit board of the power supply.

Now I don't know which power supply you have installed and how you have divided the load from the (enormous amount of) connected devices regarding the available rails. So when you use the back molex together with such a long cable, make sure that you don't overload that particular rail because you can be in for a nasty surprise.

It would not be the first time that dividing the load from a misbehaving PC differently has removed a lot if not all of the problems it had. Power supplies that have their load not evenly divided wear out more quickly as well. A little bit of common sense here works wonders.

 

mwb1100:
You could get one of those adapters that connects a bare IDE drive to a USB outlet - they always come with an AC adapter that will power IDE drives which happen to have Molex connectors.  Something like:

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16812156101

edit:

Oh - I see you already considered something like this and that it won't drive the watts/amps that you need.

Navigation

[0] Message Index

[#] Next page